Doves, has been out for a few weeks (and is now available in paperback!). One of our favorite parts of the writing process is that we learn so much about a story once it’s out of our hands and into the hands of readers. And as readers have responded to Doves, we’ve learned more about ourselves, our audience, and the story that exists between us.

1. Victor is incredibly polarizing. Which is not a shock to us, at all, really, but we’re continually fascinated (and gratified) at the number of people who can’t stop staring at Victor and poking at the things he does, even if they hate him. And in Doves, even more so than in Starling, people either adore Victor or despise him with an intensity that continues to startle us.
2. Chekov’s gun doesn’t go off in Doves, but readers keep expecting it to. Doves is a dark, angry book, and our readers apparently expected it to keep getting darker and angrier than it even was. Which apparently means our readers think we’re even more screwed up than we actually are. Which is flattering, we think?
3. At the same time, Doves apparently broke some of our readers. We’ve heard from people who have had to read it slowly, or take lots of breaks, in order to get through it, because it hits too close to home. To some extent, we’re not shocked — there are definitely scenes we had to get up and take a walk after we wrote them, to get space from what just happened on the page. But Doves is resonating with readers in a deeper way than we even hoped.
4. Not everybody’s up for a threesome, or at least the particular threesome that shows up in this book. Which is cool! People either loved or hated a particular adventure in Doves — sometimes for what it was, and sometimes for how and why it happened.
5. Liam/Alex/Paul still isn’t a love triangle, but people keep thinking it is. To be fair, sometimes Paul thinks it is too, so they do have a point. Doves is about making relationships work with whatever rules you need. Liam, Alex, and Paul aren’t involved in a love triangle in any traditional sense, but there’s a deep and intense relationship going on between those three men, even if Paul struggles with jealousy and Alex has to learn how not to feel owned by his relationships.

Read more at Romance for the Rest of Us.